William Schabas

A mokuhanga portrait of William Schabas, the Canadian international lawyer known for scholarship on the law of genocide and the International Criminal Court. The print belongs to Andrea G. Artz's ongoing series translating photographic portraits into water-based Japanese woodblock — a process that begins with a digital image, is separated into colour layers, and is then carved across multiple cherry or shina blocks before being printed by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren) onto absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi). The medium softens photographic detail into flatter tonal fields, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations standing in for the continuous shading of a camera image. Within Artz's wider practice — which originated in portrait photography and now includes folded paper sculpture and installation — the woodblock format works as a counterweight to digital portraiture: each impression is registered by hand, each colour built from a separate block, and the sitter's likeness arrives slowly through the accumulated pressure of the baren rather than the instant of the shutter.